Читать книгу A Death in Bali - Nancy Tingley - Страница 10

2

The policeman, finished retching, stood at the door and watched me; he didn’t speak to me, tell me to leave. Nor did he come any closer.

The clack-clack of the monkeys’ chatter had subsided, and now their jabbering mimicked the hum of a cocktail party, as the gamelan music rose and fell in counterpoint to them. The keening of the women, a pulse of sorrow, rose above all other sounds. The rich, sweet, fragrant aroma of cooking bananas, a particularly Indonesian smell, had filled the air when I arrived and continued unabated.

The single painting that still hung askew above the sitting platform invited my attention. The painting looked to be a Bonnet. Bonnet, a Dutch painter, came to Bali in 1929 and along with the German Walter Spies is said to have revolutionized Balinese art. This was the era that I had come to Bali to research. I squinted at the painting, trying to make out the signature. I thought briefly of walking to it, but my sandals felt glued to the floor.

I squeezed the bag and felt a surge of anger. At him for dying. At his murderer for killing him. At myself for plucking the sack from his waist. The policeman was staring at me, making it impossible to drop the sack back unnoticed. I concentrated on looking around the room for clues.

Absorbed, I didn’t hear him coming until he stood beside me. A small man, his shoulder only a few inches higher than mine. He smelled of rice and peanuts. When the call came in, he must have been eating his lunch, a salad of gado-gado with peanut sauce, or skewers of sate with the same. I continued scanning the room. He looked at the body.

“Selamat pagi,” I said, good morning, and turned again to the Bonnet. I dropped the silk sack into my pocket.

“Selamat siang,” the policeman responded, his answer acknowledging the forward movement of time. My greeting a good morning, his, a good midday.

I glanced at him and, following his gaze, said, “It must have been a man.”

“Yes. He was very strong.”

“Not long before I got here. The blood was still glistening on the blade. It looks dry now. It dried fast in this heat.”

“Ah.”

“I arrived on time, right about noon. Maybe if I’d been early.”

“No one is ever early in Bali.”

“No.” I pulled my hand out of my pocket, then stuck it back in. He was very still, this man. “If there was a struggle, I can’t make out just how it happened. Where was he standing? Who attacked whom? Is his arm raised in defense, or has it just fallen that way? And if he didn’t defend himself, why not? If the killer made a search, he was not very thorough. Unless he found what he was looking for and quit looking. Or my arrival interrupted him.”

“That’s possible,” he said.

My thoughts tumbled out of me. “There’s something vindictive about swiping the paintings off the wall. The ultimate insult for an artist, isn’t it? And, he hasn’t pulled off all of them. That Bonnet—I think it’s a Bonnet—is still there. And the Spies over there. Maybe it’s only Flip’s paintings that are now on the floor.” I looked into his eyes.

“Cruel,” was all he said.

“Jenna Murphy.” I extended my hand, realizing as I did that I held my pen, which I shifted to my left hand.

His eyes flashed for a brief moment and he gave me a closer look, scanning my face, slowing as he looked at my hair, and frowning. “Wayan Tyo. Welcome back.”

His name ruffled the surface of my consciousness, but Balinese names repeat, repeat, beginning with the indicator of birth order—Wayan, Made, Nyoman, Ketut—followed by a seemingly limited choice of given names. “I came here to talk with him about painting. To discuss the pre-war Balinese modernists. My museum—I’m a curator—was given a collection. I know that he had been pursuing serious research on the topic. Now . . . What a loss.”

We stood in silence, looking down on the man, the spear, the mess of easel and paints at his side.

I looked again at the banana frond sticking through the window and felt the sweat run down my spine. The monkeys, the cooking bananas, the jet lag, the dead body. I steadied myself. From a nearby room the shrill keening had given way to soft sobbing that shuddered a constant beat.

“Do you need to sit down?” he asked.

“I think the killer knew him and was very angry.”

“He’d have to have been feeling some strong emotion to have done this,” he said.

“Beautiful weapon. Look at the damascening. Probably quite old.” The soft patina on the wooden shaft could only be achieved over years, decades, of handling. “What does one use a spear like that for?”

He didn’t answer. Maybe he didn’t know. Maybe he was too busy making a mental inventory of everything in the room, just as I had done. Maybe he had stopped looking and was listening to the sounds of the house, the muffled footsteps as others joined the sobbing women. Maybe the person who had led me in was not a servant, but Flip’s lover, or his wife.

Finally he said, “The puputan of the royal families in the early twentieth century.”

“Puputan?”

“The finishing. The Dutch decided to conquer Bali, which they had previously largely ignored.”

“Yes, I think, yes. I would like to sit down.”

He led me to the dining table and pulled out a chair.

I tried to compose myself, to think of something other than the body that was now blocked by the chairs opposite me. “Puputan. Oh, I remember. Some of the regencies in the north fought, but the royal families in the south didn’t resist.”

“That is right. We came out of our palaces dressed in white, the color of purification and death. We carried lances—spears—though few of us used them on the enemy. Before committing suicide, we men and the older ones, men and women, killed the young women and children with our krises, so that the Dutch could not harm them. Two thousand people slaughtered in a single morning in Denpasar alone. Killed by the Dutch, outright or by suicide.”

“This lance is from that time?”

“Maybe. The puputan is what comes to mind for me when I see a lance such as this. The weapons loose in our hands, unused.”

The sobering tale caused me to ask about Flip, “Are there children?”

“No, not here.”

“A wife? Was the woman who brought me in his wife?”

“No. He had women, but no wife.”

That tallied with what I’d heard about Flip, that he was a womanizer.

“Are you in shock?”

I was startled by the question. “Shock? No, I don’t think so.”

He watched me carefully.

I thought for a moment. “I’ve been mentally cataloguing the room. Trying to imagine the event. Trying to understand what happened.”

He nodded. “What have you touched?”

I flushed, the sack suddenly heavy in my pocket. “Touched?”

He pointed at the pen that I still gripped in my hand.

I felt my cheeks heat up. “I, well . . . I wanted to see what he’d been painting. I just lifted the edge of that board a little with the pen. Took a peek. That’s all. I didn’t move it.”

“And?”

“Balinese modernist style, not his usual as far as I know.”

“Nothing else?”

I shifted the subject. “Why did you just say ‘Welcome back’? I haven’t been here since I was a child.”

His black eyes flashed as he held up his left pinky. I saw the long nail that Indonesian men favor and for a brief instant wondered what the gesture could possibly mean. Then I saw the thin, narrow scar running from the base of that finger to his wrist. I remembered the nausea I’d felt watching it being stitched. I looked again at his heart-shaped face, the delicate, feminine mouth and wide-set eyes.

“Oh, my god. It’s not possible. Tyo?”

He smiled. “Big brother. When you left Ubud all those years ago, when you were eight, I told you that your big brother would always watch over you. This is why we both stand here. I have been awaiting your return. It took you a very long time.”

We heard a commotion out in the garden, men’s adamant voices and a woman’s high, shrill words, yelling something in Balinese that I didn’t understand.

Wayan Tyo said, “She wants to come in. I must go to stop her. Come with me.”

When a man holds his hand out to you, there’s nothing to remind you of him as a child. The palm is larger, the texture of the skin rougher. But the touch is the same. When Wayan Tyo grasped my hand, he used exactly the same pressure he had used when I was eight years old and he was twelve. When his fingers wrapped around mine, electricity ran through me, not a shock or a jolt, rather like a circuit being completed. Was this why I returned? Not my work, my passion for art, my curiosity, my research of these paintings, but a man?

“I need to—” I began to pull the sack out of my pocket to give to him.

“Come,” he said, pulling me along, each step stripping my resolve to return the amulet. “We must hurry. She must not see him.”

“But I want to—” He didn’t listen, his attention on the sounds outside.

As he led me out of the living room, through the hall and out the antique carved front door, memories of that time twenty-odd years ago coursed through me, visceral and unformed. Tyo and his siblings. My brother and me. Tag, hide and go seek, kids strung together in a tug of war. My hand in his. A tear escaped my eye, muddying my vision so that I tripped over the bottom step. He steadied me without turning his eyes from the scene before us. He didn’t acknowledge my distress in any other way.

She was thrashing and screaming violently while two young policemen held her arms and tried to calm her. Her words came out in short, venomous bursts of anger. I had no idea what she was saying, but guessed that she was cursing them. Her hair had fallen out of its fastener. It hung over her shoulders and across her eyes and fell down to her narrow waist. Dropping the sack into my pocket, I ran my free hand through my short hair.

She was very beautiful, as most Balinese women seem to be. Both her face and her thin, fragile body belied the strength she displayed as she struggled with the two policemen. She wore traditional Balinese dress, sarong, sash, and the long-sleeved blouse called a kebaya. One of her rubber flip-flops had fallen off in the struggle. Her bag now lay on the ground at her feet. Suddenly she leaned back and looked toward us, her mouth opened for another burst of obscenity, but at the sight of me, or maybe of Wayan Tyo, no words came. She stared at me as if in a nightmare and sagged, so that now they didn’t need to restrain her, but to support her.

“Ulih, Ulih. You must not go in there.” Wayan Tyo let go of me and approached her. “He is gone.”

The policemen released her and she fell to her knees. “Tidak, tidak, tidak,” was all she could say. No, no, no. She began to sob quietly, her head bent to the ground, all that beautiful glossy hair spilling around her and twining in the groundcover that wove through the stones of the path. Without her to support, the policemen no longer knew where to put their hands. Wayan Tyo knelt at her side.

Flip’s death was a loss that shifted her life. Who were they to each other? If I had to guess, I would say he was her beloved.

Ulih’s heartrending sobs joined those of the mourners inside the house, and I realized that though his death angered me and I would search for his killer, it was not personal. I’d stood over his body and tried to recreate the crime. I’d escaped from the reality of a dead body into the intellectual exercise, the whys and wherefores. I looked down at my hand; it was shaking. Maybe I was in shock.

Ulih unfolded herself from the ground and from Wayan Tyo’s gentle words. She picked up her bag and asked, “Who is she?”

“She found him. She has just arrived and came to talk with him about business. She never met him.”

She turned back to go down the gaily bordered path, welcoming and at odds with the surfeit of distraught emotion. She shifted the bag from her arm onto her head, steadying it as she walked. The lush grounds and the exotic woman created a scene right out of a glossy guidebook. To the right, in the northeast corner of the property, the household shrine was laden with offerings, sacred water, woven containers resting on textiles, flowers.

It was all very pretty. I’d arrived in paradise. Or had I?

Sirens were sounding. People were gathering at the gate.

“Tyo, I need to—” I fingered the sack.

“Not now, Jenna. I’m busy here. This officer will take you back to the station for questioning.” He distractedly directed the arriving officers toward Flip’s living room.

“Aren’t you going to question me? And why do I need to be questioned? I arrived, the servant took me to the living room, and we found the body.”

“Yes.” He turned to a young man who was carrying two heavy bags. “Leave the one out here. There’s no room for all that.”

People were pressing up to the gate. An elderly woman the size of a child had entered and was toddling up the walk. “Get her out of here,” Tyo yelled to the officer by the gate, who had been too respectful of his elders to do more than scold her gently as she entered.

I pulled the sack out of my pocket. “Tyo, I need to—”

“Really, Jenna. We can talk tomorrow. You will come to my mother’s house for dinner, and we can talk then.”

“I think it’s better if . . .” I wanted to give him the sack. I wanted to turn back time and stop myself from taking it.

He said to one of the officers who had held up Ulih, “Take her down to the station and have Nyoman question her. Tell him that she was the one who found the body.”

I was beginning to panic and tried to catch his eye. “I want you to question me.” He didn’t answer. “Please, Tyo.”

Exasperated, he said, “Tomorrow. We’ll talk tomorrow.” And he turned and walked into the house.

“I need to speak with you in private,” I called out and started to follow, but the officer who was to take me to the police station stepped belligerently between us.

I felt abandoned. Annoyed. I fingered the outline of the small figure in the sack. Angry. At Tyo for not listening to me. But more at myself for taking the thing. As we walked toward the gate, I considered dropping the sack on the ground, but the thirty or forty people who had gathered to watch the excitement would see, and really, I wanted to give it to Tyo. To explain to Tyo what had been going through my mind when I’d taken it.

What had I been thinking?

I looked back at the chaos of the crime scene. At least a dozen people milled around the front yard. How many more were in the house, I didn’t know. But they were walking everywhere, through the garden, around the pool.

The officer said, “Come,” and tugged at my elbow, gently at first, but when I still didn’t move, more forcefully.

“Just a minute. What are they doing? Why aren’t they trying to find footprints? Trying to preserve the scene as it was when I arrived?”

He looked toward his colleagues and shrugged.

“They don’t know what they’re doing,” I said.

“We do not have murders in Ubud,” he said, as if that excused their behavior. They did have TV, and everyone who had TV knew what you should do at a crime scene. You should wear white booties on your feet, a mask on your face. “Come.”

“Did she do it?” someone called out as we pushed through the crowd.

“No,” he said.

But when I got to the police station, you would have thought otherwise. They took my prints and photographed and questioned me as if I were their number one suspect.